2007.11.23

Where There's Smoke...

...there's good eating - especially in Penang, where the art of cooking (not just grilling) over charcoal is alive and well.

Cooking over charcoal requires dodging leaping flames and live sparks

Our article on charcoal cooking in Penang appeared in yesterday's (November 22) South China Morning Post. If you're a subscriber you can check it out online. If you're not, enjoy these photos that didn't make the final cut.

Congrats...would love to read the article. Went to the site to take a peek but were scared away by "Your payment is secured" subscriber notice! Was thinking to sign up the trial but I know I will forget to cancel...so if you have a PDF version, please do send it to me. :)

These images are so mouthwatering they've making me hungry! I.E. they work! What a beautiful blog!!! Have just recently discovered it and I've just blogged about it on my travel blog (I'm a professional travel writer and I blog about the things I find cool about travel but my real interests are in what inspires people to travel). I'll definitely be subscribing and checking in on a regular basis! Congrats on the divine images!!!

Ooop. Wanted to paste a link to the relevant comments on blur on that thread but couldn't quite get that right. But here it is again (my comment and Dave's reply):

Dave,
At the Alford/Duguid photography seminar at IACP in Chicago, I was quite astounded to hear (I think it was Alford speaking at that point) that until quite recently, publishers of cookbooks or books/magazines on food routinely rejected pictures with any kind of "blur" in them. Maybe this is what made Neal Oshima's photographs for Memories of Philippine Kitchens-specially the ones I call his "motion pics" or "process pics" seem so novel when it came out: that spectacular cover photo of the woman making puto in Laguna is all light and smoke and movement. "Blur" also figures in a very important way in your pictures: on this current page alone, there's that photo of the pickled mustard in Nan and the pictures of halo-halo. Do you remember this little tidbit, tossed out (almost as an aside) at the seminar? Care to say something about the aesthetics of "blur" in your pictures?

Richard

Posted by: RST | May 17, 2007 at 05:59 AM

Richard, I do remember that 'little tidbit'. In fact, it found myself nodding through most of their talk. Great stuff.

...

As far as the 'blur' goes, there are two things going on. One is that I also like to try to capture motion. You can't get the feel of a market if everything is frozen still. It's the movement and chaos that makes those places so interesting. That's one of the reasons I drag a tripod along. Second, by using a shallower depth of field, like in the opening shot, the subject, which is the pickled mustard, is isolated. If the lady was also in focus, your eye would go to her or maybe just wander around photo and miss the point.

Well RST - as you know, we love blur. But not if it's overused. As for question about would it fly with major food media -- do you recall seeing blur in the likes of the US Big Four (F&W, BA, Gourmet, Saveur)? For food, that is, I think blur is more often used with scenery shots. These photos are, after all, those that *didn't* make the final cut, but then this article ran in a newspaper not a magazine. The four that did appear, while very nice (I'm biased), are static.